Considerable advances are being made in technologies for protected, trusted, Ethernet-based communications in the presence of malware attack vectors. One of the major barriers to their adoption is the capital expenditure and reengineering required to retrofit the vast existing legacy computing infrastructure. As a practical matter, governments and companies can be expected to proceed strategically by first securing their newest, most sensitive, proprietary, and/or business critical communications and infrastructure. In many companies, it likely that large portions of an enterprise network will not be addressed in the near term, if ever. For example, it may not be practical to fully secure communications with business applications such as web servers which face the public Internet. In addition, it may be cost-prohibitive to convert all light weight edge devices until they are replaced in due course by next generation devices. For the foreseeable future, protected communications networks must co-exist and communicate with unsecured networks. Accordingly, there is a pressing need for interfaces to immunize, or to at least limit the attendant risks of, communications between protected and unsecure networks.
The present disclosure relates, in certain embodiments, to methods, systems, products, software, middleware, computing infrastructure and/or apparatus applicable for bridging network communications between device networks sharing protected, trusted Ethernet-based communications with the large body of relatively unsecure legacy devices and networks.